Three Wants, Two Fixed Hours, One Plan
Yuki is planning her morning at the school festival. Her class café needs her from 11:00 to 12:00, and she must leave school by 13:15 to catch the bus. She wants to do three things: watch the Robot Club demonstration, buy a cake from the Cooking Club, and hear the Brass Band.
Programme:
- Robot Club demonstration (gym): 10:30–10:50, 12:10–12:30, 13:20–13:40
- Cooking Club cake sale (Room 3): 12:10–12:40, 13:20–13:50
- Brass Band concert (music room): 12:40–13:00
The item offers four plans. A: Robot 10:30, café 11:00–12:00, cake 13:20, home. B: Robot 12:10, cake 12:10, band 12:40, home. C: Robot 10:30, café 11:00–12:00, cake 12:10, band 12:40, home at 13:00. D: café 11:00–12:00, cake 12:10, band 12:40, Robot 13:20.
Yuki chooses A. She says: 'It is the only plan where I don't have to run between places, and I get to see the demonstration at the time I remembered.'
1. Solve the item with an elimination table. For each plan, name the single rule it breaks, and state which plan works.
Read the worked answer
Step 1 - turn the setup into three hard constraints plus one goal.
- C1: be at the café 11:00–12:00 (fixed, not negotiable).
- C2: leave school by 13:15.
- C3: no two activities overlapping.
- Goal: Robot + cake + band, all three.
Step 2 - elimination table.
| Plan | Robot | Cake | Band | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 10:30 ✔ | 13:20 ✘ | none | Breaks C2 (13:20 is after 13:15) and misses the band |
| B | 12:10 | 12:10 | 12:40 ✔ | Breaks C3 - Robot and cake are both at 12:10 |
| C | 10:30 ✔ | 12:10 ✔ | 12:40 ✔ | Fits C1, C2, C3 and all three goals → correct |
| D | 13:20 ✘ | 12:10 ✔ | 12:40 ✔ | Breaks C2 - Robot at 13:20 is after the bus |
Step 3 - answer. Plan C. Robot 10:30–10:50, café 11:00–12:00, cake 12:10–12:30, band 12:40–13:00, leave at 13:00, which is 15 minutes before the bus.
Step 4 - the check most students skip. Plan C is not the plan with the most free time; it is the plan in which every single item is inside a stated window. The band has only one performance, so it acts as an anchor: whatever else is chosen must fit around 12:40–13:00. Anchoring on the least flexible item first collapses the item to two or three checks.
2. What makes Plan A attractive, and what reading habit produces that attraction? Give the check Yuki should run before committing to a plan.
Read the worked answer
Why A feels right.
- It starts with the value Yuki already had in her head (Robot at 10:30 - the first-listed time), so it feels 'remembered' rather than 'decided'.
- It looks comfortable: no back-to-back slots, so it satisfies a wish (don't have to run) that is nowhere in the task.
- It is not obviously wrong until you compare 13:20 with the bus time, and the bus time is the constraint furthest from the cake in the text.
The habit behind it. Yuki is optimising for plausibility instead of testing against the stated constraints. She has quietly added a fourth requirement of her own ('no hurrying') and then let that requirement outrank two real ones. In information-retrieval items, self-invented requirements are the main source of wrong answers.
A second, quieter habit. She assumes the cake sale is continuous ('buy a cake' sounds like a shop). The programme gives two short windows, 12:10–12:40 and 13:20–13:50, and nothing else. A student who assumes a shop keeps shop hours will accept 13:20 without checking the end of the day.
The check to run before choosing.
- Write the fixed commitments as numbers on one line: 11:00–12:00 café, out by 13:15.
- For the chosen plan, verify each item against its printed window, not against the student's memory of it.
- Score the plan against the goal count: 3 of 3 required, not 2 of 3.
- Ask: 'Have I added a requirement the text does not state?' If yes, delete it and re-check.
3. The item never says whether Yuki can be a few minutes late for the café or catch a later bus. How should a student handle information that is absent, and why does this matter more here than in the reading passages?
Read the worked answer
Rule for absent information. Treat unstated flexibility as zero. The item says needs her from 11:00 to 12:00 and must leave by 13:15. There is no 'about', no 'if possible'. A plan that requires Yuki to be five minutes late, or to run for a later bus, depends on something the text does not give, and so it cannot be the answer.
Why this is decisive here. In a narrative passage, a gap in the text is usually filled by the surrounding story. In a timetable item the gaps are where the item is built: the wrong options are exactly the ones that need one unstated assumption (a shop that stays open, a demo she can join late, a bus that runs every ten minutes). Every wrong plan in this item requires exactly one such assumption - A needs the cake sale to continue past 13:15, B needs the 12:10 robot demo and the 12:10 cake window to be compatible, D needs the bus to be later.
What to do when a plan seems to need an assumption.
- Do not repair the text. Go back and look for a second window for the same event; the programme almost always provides one (Robot and cake each have two windows).
- If two plans both need an assumption, re-read the constraints; one of them will be satisfiable without it.
- Prefer the plan that works with the text exactly as printed, even if it is the tighter schedule. Tight but legal beats comfortable but invented.